Top stories concerning British Isles ancestral research from Irish born Scottish based professional family historian, author and tutor Chris Paton. Feel free to quote from this blog, but please credit British GENES if you do so. Should you wish to get in touch, contact me at christopherpaton @ tiscali.co.uk. Happy hunting!

In the 1800s it could be hard to earn an honest living and those that didn’t could face severe penalties which included death or transportation.

The new collection of Criminal Records available as part of the Diamond subscription package on TheGenealogist may help shed light on a family relative who seemingly vanished.

These records from the National Archives Home Office Records series HO 27, HO 13, HO20/13 and CRIM 1 contain over 90,000 records for England and Wales between 1782 to 1970.

This creates a significant collection of Transportation and Convict Records on TG of nearly 500,000 records

This Contains convicts and transportation registers from 1787 to 1870, with nearly 400,000 records from HO10 and HO11.

The new record sets also uniquely feature those people who were ‘pardoned’ by the courts and also those on trial who were regarded as ‘Criminal Lunatics’. The Criminal Lunatic Act of 1800 was introduced for the indefinite detention of mentally ill offenders, beforehand, they were simply set free if they pleaded insane!

You can find both the criminal records along with the transportation records under the “Court & Criminal” section, you can also search the entire Court & Criminal collection using the Master Search.